Yeah, another FreeNAS build..Plex plug-in question

[kn51]

My current NAS box is long in the tooth. Served me well but performance is abysmal and drives are dropping off like flies due to it being around 4 years old.

New box will reuse my Antec tower case and PSU. Right now my plan is to do a 6x4TB RAIDZ2 with WD Red drives.

So basically need a MB with 6 SATA. I boot off of USB. Right now I'm on Nas4Free (this was due to the FreeNas 8 debacle in years past). My stuff is archived off now to other drives so I can start fresh.

So with that said...

1) Majority of my storage is storing Blu-Ray ISOs for playback. I have a theater with a HTPC that automounts the images via SMB share and playback software.

2) I also use it to dump important docs, pictures,backups, music, etc. Demands are fairly low, as I'm not using this as some super SAN for VM applications. So I don't need 1,000 IOPS. But would be nice to max out a 1Gb connection when moving large files around.

3) Which brings me to the Plex plugin. Anyone use it?

4) In regards to #3, would a basic dual core Pentium (such as a G3528) be enough to handle NAS and transcoding duties? Is 16GB enough? Money isn't really a major issue, but at the same time this box will run 24/7 so hate to toss $ at overkill and electricity costs.

Thanks.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

I use the Plex plugin. It's nice. (See sig.)

For SD transcoding, the Celeron I have is easily up to 3 or 4 streams to phones and such. HD I'd imagine would be more demanding, but then again it's only 30 fps. (I've read elsewhere that even the lowly Celeron can handle a single HD stream, but two breaks it. So you should be fine with the dual core Pentium.)

Then again, the point of PLEX and on demand transcoding is that it's playback-device-agnostic. (Cell phones and whatnot.) If you're just using an HTPC with file sharing, you're probably better off with that anyway.

16GB of RAM is plenty.

As far as maxing a 1GbE connection, single drives are usually capable of doing that, with enough CPU backing them up. 6 HDDs in RAID-Z2 with sufficient RAM and CPU power will be more than enough.

I'm not a performance tuning expert, but it seems to me that if bottlenecking GbE were simply a matter of throwing hardware at it, I'd be able to copy to the file server at work faster than I can copy to the NAS at home. But they both top out around 75MB/sec for a simple large file transfer in Windows Explorer over SMB. So once you get your setup squared away, I'd be approaching it from a performance tuning angle, not a bigger-badder-awesomer angle.

From an ease-of-system-management standpoint, I'd almost rather install a Linux distro and install Plex on that, rather than messing around with jail configs and plug-ins on FreeNAS. I'm kind of fed up with FreeBSD in general though, so imnsho applies.

 

[kn51]

Thank you for the awesome reply.

Could you expand a bit on your FreeBSD feelings? One of things I like about the solution is the fact my NAS box is tucked into a corner and is headless. When an update comes along I download the image and do an embedded update. Linux option just seems like an extra headache to me.

For me ZFS is basically a need given bit errors in regards to dealing with the size of the drives.

I'm open to any suggestions...

 

[MongGrel]

I need to build one myself, someday.

Probably could with what I have all ready but never delved into it.

 

[grimpr]

I have a pc file server based on Windows 7, a haswell celeron, an Asrock B85M motherboard with an Intel nic, an Intel 520 120GB SSD for the OS and 5 1TB HDD drives for storage pooled by Stablebit Drivepool, the pc is used both as a file backup with protection and a Plex media server. Perfomance is great, the celeron can handle reasonable transcoding, network throughput from the Intel nic rarely falls below 100mb/s and the system, specially Plex Media Server is very responsive and fast with the SSD. I've long thought about using filesystems like ZFS in Freenas but i prefered the idea of standard NTFS drives since the disaster recovery tools for NTFS, if such a thing would happen, are more robust and plentiful. Also, Plex Home Theater is awesome and a step forward from using VLC etc media players.